


flight risk

by unwoundfloors



Category: Spooks | MI-5
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 19:31:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unwoundfloors/pseuds/unwoundfloors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A first step.</p>
            </blockquote>





	flight risk

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Femme (femmequixotic)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/femmequixotic/gifts).



> Post 9x08. Happy holidays, femmequixotic - I do hope you think this is alright! It's my first attempt at writing slash, and fingers crossed it's not terrible.

In the evening, in the aftermath of Harry’s unceremonious discharge from Section D, there seems to be nothing else to do but head to the pub after the first debriefing of many to come.

Dimitri thinks this could be a bad idea. There’s fury simmering slowly beneath his skin, uncomfortably warm in his veins. Betrayal that ran so deep was an entirely foreign, unknown concept to him – until he’d met Lucas North, and Lucas had begin to unravel in spectacular fashion.

He’s beginning to his edges fraying, too. Not that he wants to think about it too much.

Somehow, they’d ended up back at Thames House, again. Two-thirty in the morning and Beth’s shoes are off as she strides lightly across the rooftop, sly and beautiful. His head was beginning to ache with the amount of beers he’d consumed and the lack of water. The alcohol had done little to dull his capacity for emotion – more the opposite, really, for now he felt like a complete mess instead, dizzy and unable to make sense of anything. Tariq, bless him, had seemed more quiet than usual but was laughing with Beth as they gazed over the railing. Bloody Beth – somehow she’d managed to outdrink both of them and managed to retain her perpetual air of coolness.

“You shouldn’t smoke,” he chides her. “I dunno whether you’ve heard this before, but I have it on good authority that those things will kill you.”

She laughs, deep and throaty. “I’m sure that it’s the occasional cigarette that will kill me – not the stress of working here.” She crushed the half-smoked cigarette she’d lit up minutes ago, then tossed it to the side nonchalantly. “Bedtime for Beth, I should think,” she said, with a smile. “You two carry on with whatever ridiculousness you have planned. Enjoy being on the Grid at 9AM tomorrow.”

London never sleeps. He thinks of the way the ocean, after darkness’ descent, had become almost indistinct from the sky, save for the glittering of the waves underneath the moonlight and stars. To be able to see them in the sky, unobscured by light pollution was a novel thing for a boy who’d grown up in London.

He misses the simplicity of life in SBS. No moral conundrums and complete trust, all certainty and purpose. Orders to follow, friends to call on, and no halfway point between being and non-existence. Not feeling like he was living the life of a ghost, walking amongst shadows. Not feeling completely hollow every time he went home to his stylish, barely-furnished and almost empty flat, deleting the voicemails from mates who had absolutely no idea that his section chief had thrown himself from the top of an office tower two days ago; that the man who signed his paycheques had very nearly traded away weapons intended for genocide for the life of an analyst he could barely speak to outside of work.

He turns to Tariq. “I can’t make sense of anything right now,” he says.

 

 

 

In the morning he wakes with a spectacular headache, in Tariq’s bed, and little memory of how it had began. Bruises on his hips, the smell of sweat and sex in the air. He remembers that when they’d kissed it was desperate, Tariq’s fingers digging into his shoulders and drawing lines down his back, as if searching for something to hold onto, and the taste of his mouth and skin. Murmurs, increasingly loud and unashamed moans. He remembers Tariq pressing him down hard, into the bed, his legs splayed as Tariq's warm mouth had made him feel good in a way that'd he'd completely forgotten his was capable of, and then an alarm goes off and Dimitri rolls over, entirely displeased with the sudden transition into reality.

Tariq is gone, the curtains pulled open and letting the weak light of morning illuminate the room. Tidy, but crammed full of books and CDs, computer equipment he can barely differentiate between. He checks the bedside table – he hadn’t left a note. He rolls over to grab his phone – no messages, either, save one from Beth. Inexplicably, it’s a grainy photo of him, holding a drink with his free hand doing a thumbs-up, as Tariq stealthily pulls some sort of ridiculous expression in the background.

The lack of communication from Tariq had hurt his feelings far more than it should have. Something about the way his head pounds and his stomach feels twisted, his anger and confusion coming back in full force – bad decisions, the deflection of anger into unproductive and useless channels reminds him of Lucas, in a way and that terrifies him more than anything.

It’s then he realizes exactly how late he is to his 9AM meeting. “Shit,” he mutters to the empty room, the brittle sound of his voice reverberating through the room, reflecting off the walls and back at him. Shit, shit, shit. An accurate summary of his life at present, he feels.

He gets up and heads to the kitchen for his socks and a glass of water, and resolves to go into work and pretend that everything is chips and gravy. Whatever. Just another day at the office. He can deal with this.

 

 

 

Another pointless debriefing with another faceless bureaucrat whose mere existence sets his teeth on edge. Afterwards, Ruth is kind enough to bring him a cup of tea, some paracetamol, and even a few biscuits.

“Tariq says you, him and Beth were out late last night, and I thought you could use these,” she says, setting them down gently on his desk, her dark hair obscuring most of her face.

Tariq and his big mouth. Bollocks. Despite that, it was incredibly kind of her to do so. “Thank you,” he says, feeling unable to adequately convey his appreciation for such a small but meaningful gesture of camaraderie. There was something about it that reminded him of his brothers in SBS, and something inside him aches again.

“Dimitri, if you need anybody to talk to… I know how hard this is for you,” Ruth says, her hands fumbling with the folds of fabric that make up her skirt. She looks into his eyes, looking even sadder and more uncertain than ever, but offering a small smile. “Let me know.”

It’s the first time she’s made eye contact with anybody today, and Dimitri’s heart buckles under the weight of its significance. He’s certain that if anybody on the Grid were in need of somebody to lean on at this moment, it would certainly be Ruth, beautiful and broken thing that she is. He'd been wary of asking Ruth too many questions, painfully aware that Ruth was one of those on the Grid who understood exactly how this world would take everything away from them.

He needs to find a new job, he thinks. One that doesn’t tear everybody involved to shreds.

 

 

 

Occasionally he will recall the sensation of drowning in sharp, clear detail, the urgency and panic of being cut off from oxygen. Harry’s steely composure in walking to that meeting with Lucas, to what had seemed to be a certain death, and Ruth’s insistence on him being alone for this final moment.

Tariq was different to everybody else in Section D, he’d always thought, his seriousness when it came to his work tempered by his youthful exuberance and passion. His scruffy, uni-student manner of dress, the long hair that fell into his eyes, the awful puns and knock-knock jokes he dispensed during the rare moments of peace on the Grid. He seemed untouched by something that had managed to take hold of everybody else on his team in some way or another – something that ran through his veins, keeping him warm and alive in a way that seemed to escape him, in particular.

A piece of him wants so badly to discover what it is, to learn something of the way his complex mind works, how to make him laugh and smile the way his other colleagues do. It’s going to be hard work, he thinks – he knows for sure he’s not a particularly funny guy. But then, the rest of him is also contemplating quit his stupid job and never have to look any of these people in the face again and that’s kind of tempting but completely unworkable, too.

He makes his way back to the Grid. Beth makes the inevitable jokes about his late appearance and Tariq asks him where his hat is.

Maybe it won’t be such a long day after all, he guesses. Maybe he's just treading water.

 

 

 

He leaves the Grid at five on the dot. Without Harry around, sitting in his office and snapping off terse instructions and cutting one-liners that barely conceal the fondness he harboured for his underlings, the whole team’s existence felt almost meaningless.

He heads out the door to the supermarket for dinner, but after wandering around the aisles aimlessly for ten minutes, unable to make a single decision, he finds himself back on Tariq’s doorstep, stone-cold sober and indescribably lonely.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he admits, as soon as Tariq opens the door. He looks unsurprised, and even kind of pleased.

“Hey,” he says, the corners of his mouth turning upwards. “Back for more, then?”

Dimitri blushes. He is reminded, again, of mistakes he’d supposed to have outgrown years ago. What was wrong with him, these days? Harden up, Levendis, he thinks. “I should probably go, you probably have things to do or something.”

“We had sex, Dimitri,” Tariq says, not unkindly. “It happens, sometimes, between adults as attractive as you and I. And as for better things to do, my evening was going to consist of re-coding this database of names, drinking beer and eating chips, you tell me how important that sounds to you.”

It’s his first smile in days. “I don’t mean it like that. It’s… more than that. I... things are still really confusing right now.”

Tariq shrugs. “That’s okay. I know you, Dimitri – man of few words. Good-looking and angst-ridden. It’s fine, really. I don’t know what I’m doing half of the time, myself. Come in. Did I mention there’s beer and chips?”

He does, and something about it feels like finding his feet again.


End file.
